Worrying About Autocracy

[This is a letter to the editor that the Knoxville News Sentinel published in May 2022. Note that my long post about getting kicked out of the Oak Ridge Community Band appears below this post.]

In a recent The New Republic article, Zsuzsana Szelenyi, a Hungarian politician, describes how her former associate Viktor Orban became the strongman/autocrat of Hungary. She says that it was achieved by controlling money, ideology, and voting.

Florida’s Governor Ron De Santis muscled a measure through the Florida legislature to punish teachers and their schools for talking about homosexuality, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. The Disney organization opposed the law; it tried to persuade Floridians to push back and to persuade other companies to withhold business from Florida. De Santis then muscled through a law to punish the Disney people, a draconian withdrawal of privileges and autonomy Disney had had for decades.

I can’t imagine why a teacher would be talking to kids up to the third grade about sex at all, given that little kids are – and should be – regarded as innocent nonsexual beings. But if a student had two daddies or two mommies and the other students commented on it in uninformed or hostile ways, their teacher should be able to state nonjudgmentally and in terms the kids could understand that the arrangement was accepted by society at large. The law seems to be unnecessary.

I don’t see why the Disney organization should have been granted special privileges all those years ago. But since the Disney people had had all these perks for years and had done a good job of providing services within their autonomous area, there wasn’t any reason for De Santis to push the retaliatory action except for his pique at the Disney people’s criticizing his program. As Szelenyi pointed out, punishing people financially just because you can is a hallmark of an autocratic regime.

More and more, Florida is progressing to autocracy. I fear that Tennessee is, too.